The House of Life, A Sonnet Sequence (composite manuscript posthumously
arranged, Princeton/Troxell collection)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Production Description

Document Title: The House of Life Etc. The Original Manuscript of the Sonnets

Author: Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Date of composition: 1869-1881

Type of Manuscript: Miscellaneous collection of working MSS and fair copies

Collation: [i-iii], 1, 3-41

Note: The collection is an assemblage of different types of single
manuscripts. These are laid separately into the volume, on large leaves
that have been hand numbered 1-41. There are, however, 43 separate poems
in the collection, or parts of poems—two being on the versos
of laid in leaves. There are three manuscript pages containing front
matter to the sonnet sequence, and five of the leaves have material on
their versos.

Scribe: DGR

Corrector: DGR

Provenance

Current Location: Princeton University Library, Troxell Collection

Catalog Number: 23288

Note: The bound volume is house in Box 5 folder 3.

Physical Description

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

The title on the leather cover of this volume is misleading. The manuscript
book is not “the original manuscript of the sonnets”
of
“The House of Life” in any of its versions. It is an artificial assemblage put together
in the twentieth century, and not all of the manuscript leaves contain poems that
were part of the sonnet sequence.

The contrast with the
Fitzwilliam
Manuscript
the text of
“The House of Life” is sharp. The latter was imagined as a kind of
“manuscript version” of the sequence and was
put together by DGR's friend Fairfax Murray.

This Troxell manuscript also differs completely from the so called
Kelmscott Love Sonnets version of the
sequence—that is, the group of twenty-five sonnets that DGR
arranged as a manuscript gift book for Jane Morris. The latter is an
integral, if highly specialized, version of the sequence.

A good many of the sonnets collected in this volume were printer's copy
manuscripts for the 1881
Ballads and Sonnets texts of the poems printed there. All but three of the manuscripts
are on sheets of the lined notebook paper that is characteristic of most of
DGR's manuscripts. The three exceptions are on leaves 34, 35, and 41. These
three manuscripts are small (half sheets) from paper watermarked
“G WILMOT”. They measure, respectively (in
centimeters) , 11.5 x 18.2, 11.5 x 18.2, and 10.5 x 17.